WASHINGTON — As head of analysis for all U.S. spy agencies, Thomas Fingar was making final edits last summer on a long-awaited intelligence report on Iran.
The draft concluded that Tehran was still pursuing a nuclear bomb, a finding that echoed previous assessments and would have bolstered Bush administration hawks. Then, just weeks before the report was to be delivered to the White House, new intelligence surfaced indicating that Tehran's nuclear weapons work had stopped.
Fingar was acutely aware of the stakes. Five years earlier, grave errors helped start a war in Iraq that most Americans now regret. "This was a WMD issue in the country adjacent to Iraq," Fingar said of the Iran intelligence. "We wanted to get this right."
But Fingar would learn that getting it right did not mean he could avert the ongoing conflict between politics and intelligence in the nation's capital, and his Iran report only underscored the limitations of urgent efforts to reform the U.S. spy system.
In several interviews, Fingar offered new insight into the last-minute reversal of the Iran intelligence estimate, and the controversy that has continued to reverberate.
The report, reflecting the new intelligence, kicked the legs out from under the administration's hard-line Iran policy and stunned the diplomatic world, touching off a political maelstrom that has barely abated after five months.
For more than three years, Fingar had pushed through sweeping changes: ramping up training, adapting tools from the Internet and instituting more rigorous review for major reports. Yet the improvements in tradecraft failed to protect the Iran analysts from criticism or to preclude charges that they had political motives.
And were it not for the new intelligence that surfaced last summer, Fingar acknowledged, a key piece of the Iran report would have been wrong.
And he was forced to defend a report that was intended as a symbol of reform.
"We didn't have the dismissal of dissenting views. We didn't have a 'Curveball,' " Fingar said, referring to the discredited source behind much of the prewar intelligence on Iraq. "The image that this was somehow sloppy work in some respects has a splash effect that hits a lot more than just the analysts who worked on it. It's [as if] the whole damn community is still incompetent."
As deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, Fingar's job is to make sure that after Iraq, the teams of experts searching for answers in fragments of intelligence never again get it so wrong.
